Renewal and Commitment: Outreach Ministry Teams Build Beloved Community, Part I

Unity's Act for the Earth Community Outreach Ministry Team

Erika Sanders, Beloved Community Staff Team

​Unity’s engagement with the wider community happens, in large part, thanks to the work of nine dedicated Community Outreach Ministry Teams. Each team has a distinct focus, such as environmental sustainability, racial justice, or affordable housing, and each team partners with one or more organizations in the community to engage in education and advocacy. 

At the beginning of 2021, our teams began a process of reflection and renewal. To learn more about this, I interviewed Rev. Shay Mackay, Coordinator of Community Outreach Ministries at Unity Church.

ES: Tell me how and why the Community Outreach Ministry Teams renewal process began.
SM: In the past, each team reapplied every two years to ensure that the team’s work remained relevant and connected to the congregation and its community partners. In this time of so much transition, as well as deepening antiracist multicultural work in the congregation, leaders decided to ask the teams to reapply and also to engage in a process of reflection. We hoped that the renewal process would expand the ways that team members experience and articulate how their activities connect to their spiritual growth. This renewal process began in early 2021, and I joined the effort in July 2021. We hope it will be completed by June of this year.

ES: What types of reflection are part of the renewal process?
SM: Each team engages in the process a little differently, based on their focus, but in general, they reflect on questions such as:

• How does our work grow from our members’ faith journey?
• How does our work connect to Unity’s values of striving to embody wonder, open-hearted engagement, and courageous action?
• What characteristics of the current moment challenge or clarify our vision?
• How do our partnerships and actions relate to Unity’s commitment to advance justice, wholeness, and equity?
• What relationships and practices will make our work sustainable, while also creating caring and powerful community for those engaged in it and served by it?

Team members reflect on these questions in four group sessions, each focused on a different part of Unity’s Ends. Team members also read, watch videos, journal, and meet in discussion groups. They work with the Double Helix Model of Faith Formation and Antiracist Multicultural Work to develop practices that build connections between the spiritual foundation of their church home and the work they do as teams. We hope that this reflection helps grow their understanding of spiritual practice and the benefits of supporting each other.

ES: What are the most joyous things that you’ve seen come out of the renewal process?
SM: The process has generated a lot of wonderful dialogue within teams, and excitement for continuing to grow in this work. For instance, as a result of working with the Double Helix Model, most team members have taken the Intercultural Development Inventory and are working on their individual Intercultural Development Plans. 
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Each team is looking more closely at its relations with community organizations. They’re asking important questions about how those partnerships are or are not mutually beneficial, what each member wants from the relationship, and what team members’ aspirations are for the partnerships. We all want these partnerships to be authentic relationships of mutuality, and to avoid anything that feels like “white saviorism.” We also believe that these reflections and partnerships will help teams grow in their understanding of whiteness, of their own cultural framework. By interrogating our work we can transform how we engage with others, and it takes our understanding of how we are accountable to ourselves and to others in a much more nuanced, sophisticated direction.

Ultimately, I think that this process is making Unity’s Ends more real and present in our day-to-day work. Being able to articulate who we are and why we do what we do is very powerful.

Watch for Part II of “Renewal and Commitment,” about how one team has been transformed by this process.